His Secret Family (ARC) Read online

  She left the bouquet in an inch of water and went off to our bedroom and shut the door, and I settled back down at the kitchen table and carried on reading Harry Potter. I was distracted by the red roses, though. They looked like something that ought not to be in our kitchen, or in our lives – as if they’d been beamed down by an alien spaceship.

  I couldn’t wait for Mum to get home. I wanted to see how she’d react – that was what was going to tell me if Mark was some creepy old guy who’d had a trim and developed a fixation, like Ava had said, or if he was a genuine, proper romance. Someone who might sweep Mum off her feet.

  When she did come in, she was talking – she was always talking, even after a whole day on her feet hearing about people’s kids and their difficult old parents and their health problems. She had an inexhaustible supply of chat, but she knew when to listen, too. She always said that what people really paid her for was the chance to offload, not the haircuts, and if she could only charge them what a psychotherapist would, all our money worries would be over.

  ‘Ugh, it is so cold out there, and my feet are killing me.’

  Then she saw the flowers.

  She’d taken her shoes off at the door and put her slippers on, but she still had her coat on; it made her look eccentric, like someone on the way to being a bag lady. She approached the sink as if drawn towards some kind of miracle. Her shoulders hunched and one hand went up to her mouth. She didn’t say anything.

  ‘Mum? Mum, are you all right? Are you crying?’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine. It’s just a bit of a surprise, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s a card. Don’t you want to see who they’re from?’

  I got the feeling she already knew. Hopefully that meant it wasn’t some completely random oddball or stalker. Though maybe it made the stalker thing more likely, not less.

  She found the card, turned it over, read it.

  ‘I’m guessing you’ve had your sticky little fingers on this,’ she said.

  ‘Well.’ There didn’t seem much point in denying it. ‘I just sort of happened to see it. Who’s Mark?’

  Mum let go of the card and sighed and stretched – cutting people’s hair all day gave her terrible backache. It was obvious how pleased she was about the flowers. She was blushing slightly, and she suddenly looked about ten years younger.

  She wasn’t the Ava kind of pretty – she was more friendly-looking, and also, she tended to look a little bit frayed at the edges, like a school shirt that had been worn and washed and ironed so often there was no hiding the fact it was plain worn out. People didn’t always notice her. But when she was happy like this, she would have made an impression on anyone.

  ‘Mark’s a friend,’ she said.

  Ava said, ‘Is he your boyfriend?’

  I nearly jumped out of my skin. Ava was standing in the doorway: she’d slunk out of the bedroom without me realising. Ava could be stealthy, and she had a knack for turning up when you didn’t expect her.

  ‘I think I’m a bit old for having a boyfriend,’ Mum said.

  ‘You’re not that old,’ Ava said. ‘You’re not even forty yet.’

  Ava was sixteen, old enough to have a boyfriend herself, but she didn’t have one, had never had one, and said she didn’t want one. She poured scorn on all the boys she knew at school; they were stupid, they had BO or bad breath or bad hair, etc., etc. I could see why nobody ever asked her out; they were probably scared of her. I wasn’t an ice queen like Ava but I was too shy to be chatty like Mum, and as I wasn’t pretty either, I couldn’t see that there was much hope for me.

  Mum said, ‘Thank you for reminding me how old I am,’ and rolled her eyes to show she didn’t really mind. ‘Let’s just say Mark’s a special friend.’

  Ava didn’t look too thrilled about this. She folded her arms and raised her eyebrows, as if Mum had done something suspect. ‘Oh, really? Is he going to be sending you more presents?’

  ‘I think I’m going to be seeing a bit more of him, if that’s all right with you.’

  That hint of sarcasm was about as close as Mum ever got to telling Ava off. I was the child of the household and the only one who got bossed around, and she treated Ava more like another adult. Usually she consulted Ava about things and took note of her opinions and praised her for her good judgement, which I always found annoying. Especially because she never asked me.

  Ava said, ‘So how did you meet? Have you been online dating or something?’

  ‘No way. If you want to meet idiots you don’t have to go online to do it. Plenty of them out there in real life, just walking down the street.’

  ‘So how, then? Did you cut his hair?’

  ‘Actually, I did. Then he got in touch and asked me out for lunch, and so… well, here we are.’

  I thought, She’s hiding something.

  This piece of knowledge arrived out of nowhere, or rather, it didn’t seem to come from me.

  Ava said, ‘So you just really hit it off?’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ Mum said, as if that was a stupid question, as if the flowers had already answered it.

  She turned her back to us and lifted the bouquet out of the sink and laid it down on the worktop and let the water out.

  ‘When are you going to see him again?’ Ava wanted to know.

  ‘I don’t know. Soon, I expect.’

  Mum carefully detached the note from the flowers and tucked it in her pocket. She was going to keep it somewhere, long after the flowers had wilted and been thrown out. A memento. A marker of something significant. How long was it since somebody other than us had sent her love?

  Had Dad ever given her flowers? If he had, would there have been so many? I could picture him showing up late with a bunch of wilting carnations from the service station. But this… this kind of grand gesture… He would never have done it.

  Mum fished a pair of scissors out of the drawer and started snipping the ends off the stems of the roses. Then she said, ‘Someday I think Mark might want to meet you. Both of you. He’s already heard a lot about you.’

  Ava said, ‘You’ve been talking to him about us?’

  ‘Of course. You’re a pretty big part of my life.’

  ‘Well, that’s fast,’ Ava said flatly. ‘You cut this guy’s hair, and then you went out for lunch and now he’s sending you roses and he wants to meet your kids?’

  Mum dropped the rose she’d just cut down onto the draining-board, a bit more vigorously than necessary.

  ‘I know it seems fast,’ she said. ‘But I think you’ll feel different about it when you meet him.’

  Ava persisted. ‘When you cut his hair, did you go to his house?’

  Mum hesitated. ‘No,’ she said.

  Almost all of her clients were women and their children; she had a rule that she didn’t take on men as clients unless she knew them, or had a personal introduction. And she would never go to the house of a man she didn’t know.

  ‘Then where did you cut it?’ Ava persisted.

  ‘There’s no need to interrogate me,’ Mum said stiffly. ‘If you must know, it was some time ago. When I was still working at a salon.’

  Ava and I looked at each other. Mum carried on trimming the roses. Ava said, ‘But Mum, you haven’t worked in a salon since Ellie was born.’

  Mum ran a couple of inches of water into the vase, tore open the sachet of flower feed that had come with the roses and poured half of it in.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘And Ellie is eleven.’

  Mum picked up a handful of roses and stuffed them into the vase. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you must have cut this guy’s hair at least eleven years ago.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Mum filled the jug with water. ‘Well,’ Ava said sceptically, ‘that must have been quite a haircut.’

  Mum shrugged. ‘We hit it off. Sometimes people open up when you’re cutting their hair. You might be surprised by the things they come out with when you’re standing over them with a pair o
f scissors.’

  Ava shuddered. ‘Most people are just dying to talk about themselves. Any excuse. You’re a captive audience. Are you sure he isn’t married?’

  ‘He’s definitely not married. Any more questions?’

  ‘Is he rich?’

  Mum took her time answering this. She stripped a couple of leaves of one of the rose stems and said, ‘Yes. Compared to us, anyway. He’s not got a yacht or anything, but he’s comfortably off. He’s a good man, Ava. You just need to give him a chance.’

  ‘You seem to have decided that already,’ Ava said and went off and shut our bedroom door loudly behind her. Not quite a slam, but near enough to show that she wasn’t at all happy.

  I could see why she was worried; I was, too. Everything Mum had told us, not to mention the way things were between us and our dad, had led us to believe that to have dealings with men was to dice with disaster. And Mum was all we had, all that stood between us and chaos. We both needed her so much that if you stopped to think about it, it was terrifying. We needed her like we needed a place to sleep and breakfast in the mornings, because she was the person who provided both those things and without her absolutely none of the ordinary, everyday things we took for granted, like having a home and food on the table, were guaranteed.

  Mum said, ‘Maybe it’s just because we’re so used to nice things not happening that she doesn’t know what to do with herself when they do.’ She put both the vase and the jug on the kitchen table in front of me. ‘They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’

  ‘Beautiful,’ I agreed.

  The roses were so red it hurt to look at them. I closed my eyes and gave my head a little shake to clear it but the red was still too bright, almost viscous-looking, like blood. I could make out a buzzing or rumbling somewhere that was somehow related to them, a kind of vibration almost like thunder, but too distant to recognise. And once again, a thought dropped into my mind fully formed, as if someone else had put it there.

  It isn’t just about her. He wants something else, too.

  Mum said, ‘Are you all right?’

  I looked up at her – my worn-out mother with the aching shoulders and the sore feet, and the inch of dark in her dyed blonde hair.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. I wrinkled my nose. ‘I think maybe the flowers are giving me hay fever, a little bit. Is there anywhere else you could put them?’

  ‘In this tiny pill-box of a flat? Not really,’ Mum said, but she moved them to the windowsill.

  With the flowers out of my line of sight I felt a bit better. Mum put a readymade pie in the oven and got some potatoes on to boil, and then she sat down with me and asked me about school and told me about some of the people whose hair she’d cut that day.

  I didn’t have her to myself that often, so it felt good to be sitting together in our snug little kitchen with the supper cooking and Ava shut away somewhere else. It felt good, but at the same time it felt awful because I could tell she was happy, really happy, too happy even to worry about Ava being in one of her funny moods. And I knew for a certainty – much as I knew that she’d lied to us about how she’d met Mark, and that Mark wanted more than just her, and that the roses spelt danger – that her happiness wasn’t going to last.

  Two

  Ava

  At the end of the day I came out of school and walked round to the side road we’d agreed on earlier and there he was, waiting for us. Mum’s new man, the comfortably-off sender of red roses who’d fallen for her after a haircut and wanted to meet her kids. The potential weirdo/con artist/stalker/paedophile/axe murderer.

  Well. We’d see. If he messed with me or my little sister, he might not live to regret it.

  And after all, it really could just be love.

  I knew which car was his because Mum hopped out and waved at me, like this was all great fun, like we were about to go off somewhere thrilling instead of to a hotel in Kingston for tea. She had a nice new dress on, a blue one that she must have picked out to match her eyes.

  She got back into the car and I made a point of not hurrying to join them.

  He drove a Jag. My mum was dating a man who drove a black Jag, and one that looked like it had been lovingly cleaned and polished. And probably not by him.

  Was he for real? A middle-aged businessman who drove a Jag, dating my mother? It just didn’t add up. You’d expect someone like that to have the kind of wife who did lots of Pilates to stay in shape and wore frilly aprons to bake cupcakes. Or the ex-wife might be like that, and he’d have moved on to someone younger and showier in leopard-print.

  But would he really have fallen for a single mother-of-two, who cut people’s hair for up to twelve hours a day to pay rent on a too-small flat? Not likely. Cupid was pretty selective when it came to shooting those arrows. OK, I’d never fallen in love myself, but I knew that much.

  Mum wasn’t exactly past it, and I didn’t begrudge her the chance of happiness… after all, she’d been married to Dad, she deserved a break. But this? There had to be a catch.

  What was really infuriating was that normally Mum would have agreed with me. But since Mark had come on the scene she’d turned into someone I couldn’t quite reach. She kept saying things like, ‘Let’s just wait and see how it all turns out, shall we?’ But I’d seen her forgiving Dad, taking him back, fighting him, being sad when he left again. As I might have said to her if we’d actually talked about it, she didn’t have the greatest track record.

  And would Mark really have looked her up just because she’d given him a trim years ago? That story didn’t seem any more likely now than it had done when Mum first came out with it. There had to be more to it. None of it added up.

  I got into the back of the car next to Ellie, who gave me a tight little smile. She was giving off a weird, intense vibe – a mixture of excitement and nerves, but too much of both. That was Ellie for you. My mum always said she was sensitive. Other people had been known to say she’s not all there.

  Mark turned round and looked at me. Was he handsome? If you were into older men (which I wasn’t) then the answer had to be, yes he was. He had good skin and a well-made face and a slightly nervous smile.

  I didn’t smile back. I knew I probably should, since he was obviously making an effort, but I just didn’t feel like it. I wasn’t the sort of person who went round smiling at people just because they smiled at me.

  He glanced briefly at Ellie, who was gazing at him like a slightly anxious puppy, and turned back to me. Maybe he figured that Mum would listen to my opinion. But if he really wanted to get in with us, shouldn’t he have figured out that the three of us came as a package – that he needed to make a good impression on all of us?

  ‘Good to meet you,’ he said, and reached out with his hand and waited for me to shake it.

  At least his hand wasn’t too gross: it wasn’t hairy, and he wasn’t wearing a signet ring. Actually, it looked pretty much like a woman’s hand – soft and slim, with tapering, sensitive fingers. A piano-playing kind of hand.

  Dad’s hands weren’t like that at all. They were broad and practical, as if they were made for fixing things. But they shook from too much booze, and it wasn’t easy for him to fix things any more.

  My own hand was a bit hot and sticky and embarrassing, but there was no way out of it, so I took Mark’s and pressed it quickly and let it go.

  He looked at me as if there was something he really wanted to say, but couldn’t. Something he felt bad about. Then he moved across to Ellie and held out his hand to her. She took it and clasped it and dropped it as if it had burned her, staring at him unblinkingly all the while.

  Maybe Mum had warned him about how strange she was sometimes. Her reaction didn’t seem to faze him. He turned away and started the car, and off we went.

  * * *

  It was a pretty smooth ride. Mum drove an old banger, and I’d never been in a car as expensive as that. It smelled good, too. Mum never cleaned our car, and it smelled of old farts and feet; Mark’s car smelled of
air freshener and manly aftershave. I didn’t want to like it. But I did.

  Mark probably liked showing off his fancy car, and who could blame him?

  I’d told Mum there was no need for him to pick us up. I could have taken Ellie into town to meet them. No big deal. But Mum had been keen for us to all go together. No doubt she loved being chauffeured around, for a change. She’d spent years driving Dad home from places back when they were still married, before Ellie was born. I could remember feeling worried for him when he’d thrown up out of the window, and cross with her for being angry with him about it. I hadn’t understood why he was being sick. I thought he was ill, which in a way he was.

  Dad actually wasn’t a bad driver, though I wasn’t crazy about getting into cars with him because I knew how much he drank; I was always really nervous that he was going to get pulled over and breathalysed. (I worried about that more than about him having an accident.) Mum was always nervous on the road; she let other people bully her and stress her out. But Mark was a good, confident driver. He was scientific about it, like a pilot in the cockpit of a plane.

  I thought, one day I want to be able to drive like that. And that was the first thing about Mark that I liked. When it came down to it, even though I had been suspicious of him to start with, I felt safe with him in a way that I had never done with Dad.

  * * *

  The hotel Mark had chosen to take us to was a Victorian manor house set in manicured grounds. He parked and we went inside and the maître d’ smiled at Mark like he knew him, which maybe he did. Then he smiled at us like he didn’t know us, but would really like it if we went there all the time, and showed us to a table.

  The dining room was all done up like the set of a BBC period drama, with oak panelling and a chandelier and china that would probably be expensive to replace if you broke it. There weren’t all that many people there and they were mainly either old or really old. Probably the place had to charge a fortune for a cup of tea just to break even. It was grand and it was intimidating, but it wasn’t at all cool. That was the one thing that made me feel entitled to sneer at it a little, which I felt obliged to do because I hated the idea that the kind of people who usually hung out somewhere like that might feel entitled to sneer at me.